Tuesday, September 29, 2009

I've been playing MMO games since about the time Lineage 2 came out, and have been playing computer games for much longer than that. The thing that really got me into the whole RPG scene was Neverwinter Nights. It was a great game. The server vault option on multiplayer servers is what led me to MMOs.

I mostly have played melee characters with, up until recently, a focus on damage dealing classes. I'll always have a soft spot for the rogue archetype, but I've found that I really have been enjoying the heavy plate wearing tank archetype quite a bit.

My current active characters in wow are:Level 69 Warrior - active, although leveling slowlyLevel 59 DK - barely active, as you can tell from the level

Hopefully this will be a fun project to talk about gaming, specifically the World of Warcraft from two points of view.

Recently my wife and myself returned to Warcraft and one of my wife's livejournal friends got suckered into trying the game. As we all know it's a slippery slope and he's well on his way.

Having somebody come into a game that's going on 5 years old and having a somewhat innocent (for the lack of a better term) view on the game got me curious about starting a blog with two points of view on various WoW topics.

So, to kick things off, I thought a general synopsis of race and class balances across the various servers would be interesting.

Using warcraftrealm.com's census tools we can see some interesting trends. This is showing 3,010,592 total characters. This data is only that which has been submitted by specific people using an addon on that tracks the census, however it still serves to give a basic snapshot of the population and various trends.

Level 80 population by race

18%-------9%-------9%-------36%-------29%

33%-------14%-------21%--------9%------22%

Level 80 population by class (both factions)

15%-------10%-------9%-------9%-------13%

--9%-------8%-------8%-------8%------10%So what sort of conclusions can we draw from this?

Alliance players must lack imagination. Who wants to join a fantasy world and create a human?Also, you can see how much love the dwarves and gnomes get. Even the new guys on the block are more popular than them. I guess people like space goats.

Horde players got a, as my wife puts it, "pretty" race and they're all over it. The newest race to the Horde also holds the highest population. I was not surprised by the Troll population. Nobody likes Trolls, seriously. I was surprised to see that the Orc population was that low in comparison to the others.

Now we get to the classes and no surprise there. You guessed it. Death knights are the king of the castle currently. And why shouldn't they be? They're the new fancy class. Also, as a side note, 41% of the DK population seems to be either Human or Blood Elf.

What would be an interesting chart to see is how many main spec varieties there are of the different classes. In other words, how many healers, tanks and dps are floating around out there.